Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Classics

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.'

In Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice once again finds herself in a bizarre and nonsensical place when she passes through a mirror and enters a looking-glass world where nothing is quite as it seems. From her guest appearance as a pawn in a chess match to her meeting with Humpty Dumpty, Through the Looking Glass follows Alice on her curious adventure and shows Carroll's great skill at creating an imaginary world full of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'The rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open...'

Victor Frankenstein's monster is stitched together from the limbs of the dead, taken from 'the dissecting room and the slaughter-house'. The result is a grotesque being who, rejected by his maker and starved of human companionship, sets out on a journey to seek his revenge. In the most famous gothic horror story...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.'

Shipwrecked on the high seas, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself washed up on the strange island of Lilliput, a land inhabited by quarrelsome miniature people. On his travels he continues to meet others who force him to reflect on human behaviour - the giants of Brobdingnag, the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. In this scathing satire on...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.'

Huck Finn escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and so begins his journey through the Deep South, seeking independence and freedom. On his travels, Huck meets an escaped slave, Jim, who is a wanted man, and together they journey down the Mississippi River. Raising the timeless and universal l issues...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'How sad it is I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young... If it was only the other way '

Wilde's first and only published novel recounts the story of handsome Dorian Gray who upon having his portrait painted desires that it will age and grow ugly while he may remain eternally beautiful. The painting, which reflects each of Gray's sins and transgressions in its hideousness, haunts him until it finally becomes unbearable. In this dark tale of duplicity...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'"Come along, Toto," she said. "We will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again."'

Swept away from her home in Kansas by a tornado, Dorothy and her dog Toto find themselves stranded in the fantastical Land of Oz. As instructed by the Good Witch of the North and the Munchkins, Dorothy sets off on the yellow brick road to try and find her way to the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz, who can help her get home.

With her companions the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly and spectral.'

Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine, Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles follows the infamous Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson as they investigate the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville, whose dead body is found on the misty and desolate Devon moors.

The locals blame his death on the legend of the fearsome phantom hound that they claim has haunted the Baskerville family for generations....

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.'

Written at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Persuasion is a tale of love, heartache and the determination of one woman as she strives to reignite a lost love.

Anne Elliot is persuaded by her friends and family to reject a marriage proposal from Captain Wentworth because he lacks in fortune and rank. More than seven years later, when he returns home from the Navy,...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.'

At the peak of European Imperialism, steamboat captain Charles Marlow travels deep into the African Congo on his way to relieve the elusive Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader renowned for his fearsome reputation. On his journey into the unknown Marlow takes a terrifying trip into his own subconscious, overwhelmed by...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that - categories like that - won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.'

Newland Archer, a successful and charming young lawyer conducts himself by the rules and standards of the polite, upper class New York society that he resides in. Happily engaged to the pretty and conventional May Welland, his attachment...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.'

Earnest and naive solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to organise the estate of the infamous Count Dracula at his crumbling castle in the ominous Carpathian Mountains. Through notes and diary entries, Harker keeps track of the horrors and terrors that beset him at the castle, telling his fiance Mina of the Count's supernatural powers and his own...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Now he found out a new thing - namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.'

An idyllic snapshot of a boy's childhood along the banks of the Mississippi River, Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the author's work that comes closest to his boyhood experiences of growing up in Hannibal in the 1840s.

Mischievous and full of energy, Tom enjoys childish pranks and pastimes with his friends, Huck Finn, the town...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and . . . he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire, and to plunge into the forest.'

Half St. Bernard, half sheepdog, Buck is stolen away from his comfortable life as a pet in California and sold to dog traders. He soon finds himself aboard a ship, on its way to Northern Canada. Surrounded by cruelty, Buck's natural instincts and behaviour begin to emerge as he works as a mail carrying sled dog, scavenging for food, protecting himself against other...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.'

Revealing the truths and realities about Irish society in the early 20th century, Joyce's Dubliners challenged the prevailing image of Dublin at the time. A group portrait made up of 15 short stories about the inhabitants of Joyce's native city, he offers a subtle critique of his own town, imbuing the text with an underlying tone of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

Originally published in 1903-1904, The Return of Sherlock Holmes is the thirteen-story collection of one of the greatest-ever fictional detectives. Three years after the supposed death of Sherlock Holmes and his archenemy Professor Moriarty in the torrent of Reichenbach Falls, Holmes makes a disguised reappearance to Baker Street and his good friend Dr Watson.

Featuring one of Holmes' greatest adversaries, Charles Augustus Milverton, as well as trademark astute logic, forensic science,...